B.R. artist renders movement in sculpture with 3D printer

“Pardon this,” Baton Rouge artist Brad Bourgoyne says, walking under a thin rope strung across the length of his University Acres living room. “The kids and I were making tents last night.” With his trimmed salt-and-pepper beard and thin frame beneath a green shirt tucked neatly into faded jeans, Bourgoyne looks every bit the cross-pollination of artist and engineer as he walks out back. To his right is a large swing set. Ahead is his workshop, and next to that, a scale prototype for Ascending Path, the award-winning sculpture he designed with Aaron Hussey. The finished piece stands at the flashpoint of the Trail of Tears in Chattanooga, Tenn. It is a gorgeous memorial to the Choctaw, Cherokee and other Native Americans forced violently out of the Deep South in the 1830s. Ascending Path is perhaps the most somber of Bourgoyne’s reflections on movement; but what eccentric photography pioneer Edward Muybridge studied in staccato with revolutionary and successive still images of a horse galloping or a nude model ascending a staircase in the 19th century, Bourgoyne renders fluid, surreal and beautiful with cast bronze sculptures of all shapes and sizes. His is the worship of motion, a devotion to the details and the minutiae of movement, and much of it would not be possible without his trusty 3D printer and scanner. Read the full story by Jeff Roedel in this month’s 225 here.